Every year at the Bonneville Salt Flats, a group of daredevils gathers to do one thing — go as fast as possible on anything with wheels. Motorcycles, cars, and even jet-powered monsters that have more in common with aircraft than anything on road spend one week in the desert trying to break records. Director Skylar Nielsen talks to these speed freaks about what keeps them coming back.

An artificial island, a Buddist guru, endangered birds, and the UN building — New York City's U Thant Island has a very interesting history. For an island measuring about 100 by 200 feet, it has a lot of history, even for a place like New York. Vox takes a trip down the East RIver to U Thant, and learns a little about canoeing in the process.

Pro-BMXer Nigel Sylvester travels a lot. From Tokyo to LA and points beyond, Nigel has been all over the world. Now he's making a stop in Dubai. Starting with a skydive into the desert, Nigel hitches a ride into the city and brings you a unique tour of the places and people from a BMX point of view.

Most of us put a lot of stuff in our packs each day. So it needs to be organized, protected, and not look like we're carrying everything we own. The Pro Pack is designed to hit all those marks, with plenty of compartments for organization, but a minimalist, slim look and feel for the working professional. It stands upright for easy access and protects against the elements with waterproof zippers, a waterproof polyurethane bottom, and a water-resistant poly twill fabric exterior.

For Issue 03, we headed to upstate New York to test drive the prototype electric Bollinger B1, the next-generation minimalist utility truck. We then took a classic Ford Bronco from the 1970's down Kentucky's legendary Bourbon Trail, stopping and sampling all along the route — and even getting schooled by master distiller Jimmy Russell. You'll find the world's best bourbon guide in this issue, with 25 bottles ranging in price from $25 to $4,000 a bottle. To complete our boxy, American-made SUV trifecta, we drove an Icon Ford Bronco up to Yosemite. Finally, we wrapped things up with edited guides full of the best hiking boots, backpacks, turntables, headphones, and camp knives.

What if famous directors were famous chefs instead? It's a question philosophers and scientists have been agonizing over for decades. David Ma has finally given us the answer with a series of short films imagining classic dishes in the style of Hollywood blockbusters. In the lastest installment in the series, he reimagines spaghetti and meatballs with a dose of violence, Tarantino-style.

There are a lot of references to other battle scenes in the epic dragon attack in Game of Thrones. From American westerns to Mongol invasions, napalm in Vietnam and the Spartans in 300, the writers drew from a lot of sources to create the scene. Nerdwriter digs up some of those references to recreate the loot train attack with shots from other films.